And I want to record what the corridor did, because it is the reason any of this went the way it went.
Nobody intervened. Twenty people, including two nurses and a security man, and not one of them moved.
That is not cowardice and I have stopped describing it that way.
It is what happens when a man in a four-thousand-dollar suit speaks calmly in a public place. He did not raise his voice once. He was perfectly polite.
Everything that made it possible for twenty people to stand still was in his volume.
And the lawyer behind him already had the folder open.
Not reaching into a case. Open, in both hands, at one particular page. His briefcase was closed on the floor by his shoe.
Which means it had been opened at that page before either of them came round the corner.
I did not read it that night. I want to be accurate about that, because the version people prefer has me reading it in the corridor and going white.
I did not take it and I did not look at it. I said four words back to Ridley, and I have been asked what they were about nine times, and they were:
Take your hand off.
He did. Immediately, and without any fuss at all, which told me something else about him.
Then I went back into that room and shut the door and sat down, and they were still in that corridor forty minutes later, and they left at about a quarter past nine.
The lawyer came back on the Thursday with the same folder, to my quarters, and that is when I read it.
PART 4
The agreement was dated nine days before.
Nine days before anything happened. I have the drafting date and the file reference and both are on the document itself.
Somebody sat in an office on a Monday and drafted that document while my daughter was still going to work, still answering my calls, still telling me everything was fine.
It was not written in response to anything.
It was written in advance, which is the single most frightening fact in this entire account and the one that took me longest to be able to say out loud.
And then there is the second thing, which took my solicitor about four days.
It is a template.
Same structure. Same two clauses. Same firm. Same paragraph numbering, which is what gave it away, because paragraph numbering is the one thing nobody thinks to change.
